The Precious Frick Library

By Teresa Rivas

On Jan. 19, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring will come down off the wall at the Frick Collection in New York. As the masses finally drift from the long rooms and the Frick’s permanent cache of masterpieces, it’s an ideal moment for budding collectors to familiarize themselves with one of the museum’s hidden jewels: The Frick Art Reference Library.

Heiress Helen Clay Frick founded the library in 1920 to honor her father, Henry Clay Frick, the year after the wealthy coke-coal and steel industrialist, financier, and art collector died. Frick was ­notorious for alternating his favoritism between Helen and her brother, Childs, the only Frick children to survive childhood. After Frick heavily ­favored Helen in his 1919 will, she and her brother stopped speaking, a 46-year estrangement that lasted until Childs’ death in 1965. But Helen remained adamantly loyal to her father; she ­actively defended his reputation throughout her life and used her $38 million inheritance—more than $500 million in today’s dollars—to further his philanthropic goals and dedication to art.

Helen researched artists for her father while he was alive, but later channeled that energy into turning the Frick library into a premier center for historical, collecting, and provenance research. Frick’s private collection, from Frans Hals to James McNeill Whistler, is one of the most coveted in the world, but it’s the library built by his daughter that has pursued his goal “to encourage and ­develop the study of the fine arts, and to advance the general knowledge of kindred subjects.” Once crowded into the Frick mansion’s bowling alley, it is now housed in a 13-story structure designed by the architect responsible for the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Until her death in 1984, Helen worked tirelessly to fill the ­library’s archives with catalogues raisonnés (catalogs of groups or schools of artists), historiography, iconography, technical analysis, auction-sales information, and documents related to patronage, collecting, and provenance. But her most important contribution to art history is arguably the library’s Photoarchive.

The Frick Art Reference Library is open to the public and invaluable to collectors and historians pursuing research. Credit: Michael Bodycomb/The Frick Collection.

Helen commissioned her first photo expedition in 1922, with the goal of recording significant and seldom-reproduced works of art in Europe and the U.S. It was remarkably farsighted, as many of these priceless works were eventually lost, damaged, or destroyed in the war years that followed. Enlisting the help of ­renowned art historians and photographers—including Lawrence Park, W.W.S. Cook, and Clotilde Brière—Helen relied on her ­influence and determination to gain access to and document many jealously guarded private collections.

After 15 years of haphazard housing, the Frick library moved to its current location, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 70th Street, and opened to the public in 1935. During World War II, the Committee on the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas was based at the library. It was closed for six months, marking the only time in its history that it shut its doors to the general public. The committee used the Photoarchive to identify sites of important cultural treasures that should be protected from the dangers of war, a campaign ­dramatized in the ­upcoming film The Monuments Men.

The library’s meticulous records—now more than one million photographic reproductions of Western artworks that span the fourth to the 20th centuries—were used after the war to help reunite artworks with their rightful owners, and does so to this day. The ­library has also partnered with the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. as part of the New York Art Resources Consortium. In recent years, the ­library’s research has created exhibitions on the collections of other financiers, from the Medicis to the Rockefellers.

But there’s a lesson on family legacy here, too. Beyond creating a renowned resource for art lovers, Helen’s work has greatly rehabilitated her family name. Many people today don’t know that Henry Frick was reviled. Called the “most hated man in America” and among the “worst American CEOs of all time,” Frick was infamous for his ruthless business tactics and brutal strikebreaking. He survived an assassination attempt thanks to the quick thinking of Carnegie Steel executive John George Alexander Leishman, and yet, five years later, the unsentimental ­tycoon helped orchestrate Leishman’s ouster from Carnegie Steel.

Frick’s sins have been largely eclipsed by Helen’s work, as the Frick name became associated with invaluable art and ­superlative research. That’s a lesson worth absorbing. On its own, the collection is of course deeply admired and coveted, but it’s the under­appreciated library that has quietly built global goodwill and sig­nificantly ­rehabilitated the family’s reputation.

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There are 7 comments

JANUARY 17, 2014 1:21 P.M.

JT wrote:

Loved the article but why omit the name of the "architect responsible for the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington".

JANUARY 17, 2014 3:25 P.M.

Gran Torino wrote:

Solid focus by Penta on the various shades of family legacy (ranging from this article to your recent tidbit on family protraits). Thanks for this spotlight on a non financial issue that can only enhance a family'sfinances via proper focus on the long term. Reminds me of the Steven Pressfield phrase, "amateur's tweet, professionals work...." GT

JANUARY 18, 2014 7:35 P.M.

Tango wrote:

Frick's library is really good. What is fantastic are the individuals who work their .

JANUARY 23, 2014 5:32 P.M.

Tiredofflippingthebill wrote:

Here is an example of someone who was a real SOB -- Old man Frick who is now a dear philanthropist. He is the guy that set the Pinkertons on the steel workers at the Homestead Ironworks. Alexander Berkman tried to kill him afterward.

Frick had the maintenance people lower the top of the dam at Johnstown (this made is wider) so that his carriage could drive across it. No one was ever sued of held accountable for that disaster.

AUGUST 16, 2015 6:18 P.M.

http://odszkodowaniazaslupy.ovh wrote:

Dead composed written content, thanks for entropy. "In the fight between you and the world, back the world." by Frank Zappa.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015 8:32 A.M.

Calvado wrote:

Some really fantastic content on this website , thanks for contribution.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Sonia Talati is Penta’s reporter about town, both online and for the magazine. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and various television station affiliates around the country. Sonia has a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.